http://somecanadianskeptic.blogspot.com/2009/08/michael-shermer-false-profit-of.html

Worse, private schools are generally Catholic or religious. By giving out vouchers to private schools the government most definitely skews the line between the separation of church and state.

Educational entrepreneurs are everywhere in public schools, developing standards, professional growth, and methodologies of teaching. Good teachers will implement such measures with appropriate training. In this essay, you seem to imagine teachers as having very little power.

Stick to skepticism, Mr. Shermer… not education politics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teach_For_America
In a study published by the Urban Institute and the Calder Center in March 2008, the authors found “that TFA teachers tend to have a positive effect on high school student test scores relative to non-TFA teachers, including those who are certified in-field. Such effects exceed the impact of additional years of experience and are particularly strong in math and science.”

The history of “public utilities” is a history of firms seeking above-market returns in exchange for “regulatory discipline.” Since the firms themselves write the regulation, this “regulatory discipline” is as meaningful as the “conflict” in studio wrestling.

The prevalence of erroneous beliefs about history, which happen to be propagated by government monopoly schools, suggests that those institutions are more about promoting the government line than about discovering the truth. Skeptics are surely aware that at least two States – California and Texas – have state-wide agencies which control all textbooks used in their states. Richard Feynman documented his experience on such a committee. Their efforts were less about improving the educational quality of textbooks than about improving their political quality.

Some commenters remark that European government schools are better than American schools. You may be accustomed to thinking of Europe as “socialist” and America as “laissez faire”, but the reality is that we Americans can afford a lot more political lobbying than Europeans can, so our schools are actually more politicized than theirs.

I have a grandson who, at the age of five, emailed me a cryptogram of his own devising, and challenged me to decode it. I did so, and responded with another, which he decoded. He and his siblings read fluently. At the age of seven, he confidently handles negative numbers, fractions, decimals, and other problems which would challenge high school students. He’s not a genius; he has the advantage of being a second-generation homeschooler. Like many others, he doesn’t waste time on the factory approach to education.

People who claim to be “skeptics” are entirely too willing to believe that the Authorities know all the answers about how to teach effectively. Free market providers swap information; they try what works and discard what does not. In short, they innovate. Governments coerce; they reduce choices; they may sometimes outlaw bad choices, but above all, they do not innovate; inertia causes governments to preserve old ways of doing things, however flawed they may be. How can you tell that a better way exists, absent comparision? Today, homeschooling provides a window by which we can compare our “fine government schools” to unregulated alternatives.

True skeptics are invited to investigate the research into the performance of homeschoolers. If they can explain why children learn to read and write at home by the age of three or four, but government schools consider it a marvel at the age of nine or ten, I’d be all ears. It’s a fair bet that most of you who consider yourself very bright learned a great deal outside of the school environment.

http://thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2009.04.17.001.pdart